April 30, 2013

Do You Feel a Draft? No? You Should!

We have drafted soldiers. We draft football players. We draft baseball players. We draft basketball players. But we don’t draft candidates for political office. We wait until they volunteer. Then we make them compete in a money contest called a “primary election.” Then we are allowed to choose which of the survivors we want in all of the various elected offices we vote for.

Through this process we have ended up with a large number of incredibly, stultifyingly stupid politicians. (I don’t want to pick on Texas, but sheesh!) Some of these people I wouldn’t let into my house to clean my carpets. But often they are the only candidate offered.

But we always have a choice between two candidates, no?

No.

There are a great many Congressional districts, for example, that are considered “safe,” thanks to clever computers programmed by Republicans after the last Census. (Why we can’t program computers to decide on electoral districts and get the damned parties out of it, I do not know.) Candidates running in “safe districts” know that all they have to do is win their primary and they will automatically win the general election because the Republican (or the Democrat) always wins in that district. And too often a knuckle dragging moron gets elected.

We need more capable candidates and we need a draft to select them. Then if we can eliminate or reduce the role that campaign finance plays, we may have real choices between capable candidates. And wouldn’t that be refreshing.

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

Related

Not a bad idea Stephen but for the public to draft suitable candidates they would have to follow them closely and know what their priorities really are. I don’t think you can drag enough people away from their staged “reality” TV programs to make that kind of time investment for the sake of their own political futures. 😦

But then possibly a more informed minority would be doing the drafting. I am sure the parties would be organizing to affect these if we had them. It would be interesting to be able to do an experiment somewhere.

I’ve been suspicious that maybe we should consider backing politicians (even a single one, tbh) who haven’t already been vetted by massive, multinational corporations and the global elite before they even stand for election. Just a thought.

I never would want to demean the achievements of the great State of Alaska, but I grew up in California where we had quite a few incompetent elected officials, but when we moved to Chicago we realized that there was real corruption right here in Illinois! But not much stupid in eaither case. But the 24-hr news cycle is letting us hear from people we wouldn’t ordinarily and, Oh my gosh!

Apparently the Corporate Masters do not mind stupid. Possibly because they can’t understand (or is it read) a piece of legislation, they need guidance in how to vote on it.

The appraoch that might work to eliminate the vetting is to follow in Grover Norquist’s steps an extract pledges for politicians when they are just getting their feet wet, that they will only accept donations from individuals. That effort seems to be working.

That last paragraph is pretty much true. But also, the left needs to be willing to have a party line and punish politicians who don’t live up to promises. The right will sit it out for an election cycle and let their politician flounder, but Obama, as just one example, can scare us into voting for him because of abortion right, and in the short terms it’s the smart thing to do, but in the long terms it has corroded the left. We don’t need to extract pledges from left wing politicians–we need to extract pledges from left wing voters.